Donald to conduct 
this weekend's premiere concerts with 
The Crossing and the Philadelphia Orchestra
at Verizon and Carnegie Halls
A window closes, a door opens. 

We've waited quite some time to collaborate
with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

For the occasion, John Luther Adams wrote a beautiful piece for our two ensembles, together. An elegy. A lament. For the Earth. Things we care deeply about. 

We are disappointed that Yannick is ill. He cannot lead this weekend.
 
But we're pretty excited that The Crossing will be "whole": Donald will be conducting our 32 voices and the Philadelphia Orchestra in the world premiere performances of JLA's Vespers of the Blessed Earth. 

Maybe the music will hit our ears like a door opening,
reminding us of the wonder of the natural world. 

Join us in Philadelphia and New York for The Crossing's first collaboration with the Philadelphia Orchestra – with Donald 'breathing us through' John Luther Adams' music. 

Thursday, March 30 @ 7:30pm
Saturday, April 1 @ 8pm
Sunday, April 2 @ 2pm
The Kimmel Center, Philadelphia
Friday, March 31 @ 8pm
Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, Carnegie Hall, NYC
Earth, nothing more. Earth, nothing less.
And let that be enough for you.
— Pedro Salinas

Vespers are night prayers. My distant model was the Vespers of Monteverdi. But rather than prayers to the blessed virgin, these are vespers to the blessed earth.

A Brief Descent into Deep Time traverses two-billion years of earth’s history, through the names, colors, and ages of the geologic layers of the Grand Canyon. A Weeping of Doves is grounded on the calls of the beautiful fruit dove (Ptilinopus pulchellus), native to the tropical rainforests of Papua New Guinea. On summer evenings, bright clouds sometimes appear on the horizon, pulsing with color as if illuminated from within. As we pollute the atmosphere more and more, Night-Shining Clouds become more widespread, and as the sun sets on carbon-burning culture, the earth just grows more beautiful. The text of Litanies of the Sixth Extinction is entirely in Latin, the scientific binomials of 193 critically threatened and endangered species of plants and animals, ending with Homo sapiens. Aria of the Ghost Bird is my setting of the call of the now-extinct Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō (Moho braccatus), transcribed from a recording of the last male of the species, singing for a mate who would never come.

— John Luther Adams
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